


Family, Failure, and Personal Belief Systems

by Diary



Category: Black Panther (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Apartment Setting, Bechdel Test Fail, Bottle Episode Fic, Brother-Sister Relationships, Canon Character of Color, Canon Crossover, Cross-Generational Friendship, Female-Male Friendship, Late Night Conversations, Literal Sleeping Together, Love, POV Everett Ross, POV Male Character, Post-Black Panther (2018), Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-01
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-05-16 18:47:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14816856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Diary/pseuds/Diary
Summary: Agent Ross is on vacation when Princess Shuri shows up at his apartment. He mostly goes with the flow. Complete.





	Family, Failure, and Personal Belief Systems

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own Black Panther.

He’s going stir-crazy on his third day of mandated vacation time.

The company’s careful not to call it ‘mental health leave’. Certain agents are forced to take time off to make as sure as possible they don’t suffer a mental breakdown or simply become utterly burned out. In theory, he agrees this is a good idea.

There’s a knock on the door, and looking through the peephole, he makes his gun safe before answering. “Princess Shuri.”

“I’ve been banned from every hotel in the city.”

“Come in. I’ll change my sheets. Please, don’t blow up my TV.”

He'd meant it as a joke, but she looks at him with wide eyes. “Did they call you, too?”

Getting the distinct feeling this is one time she isn't joking or putting on a show herself, he responds, “No. You blew up a TV?”

“I fixed their absurdly slow Wi-Fi.”

“And in the process blew up a TV?”

“No. I wouldn’t make such a miscalculation.”

He decides he’ll probably spare himself a headache by not trying to figure out what exactly the story is. “Is anyone else going to be joining you?”

“No, T’Challa will come get me tomorrow afternoon.”

“Okay, well, help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge, but if you want to order out, you’re paying for it.”

She nods. “Thank you, Agent Ross.”

…

At night, he fixes up the couch.

“You don’t have to give up your bed.”

“I usually sleep on the couch, anyways. Just, please, don’t fix my Wi-Fi. I’m fine with its speed.” He sits down.

“Why do you usually sleep on the couch?”

“That’s a personal question, your highness.”

To his surprise, her expression suddenly has a sadness to it. “Would you let me stay here if I weren’t a princess?”

“Of course. You saved my life. More than that, you saved me from potential life-long disabilities. I can do still do my job, serve my country, because of you.”

Some of the normal sparkle re-enters her eyes.

“But if you blow up my TV, intentionally or not, I’m calling your brother and politely asking him to come get you unless he wants a grievance filed against Wakanda for diplomatic misbehaviour.”

She laughs.

…

Teenagers don’t often sleep, or at least, not during the night.

His cousin has a toddler daughter, and she’s only just finally started sleeping through the night. He likes to joke about how, in just a few years, his cousin will be losing sleep over all the phone calls from teachers complaining she’s too sleep-deprived to pay proper attention in class, but the truth is, this knowledge is largely abstract. It’s been so long since he was a teenager himself, and he doubts he’ll ever see his cousin’s daughter often even after she’s grown some.

At 1:12, he jumps awake at the sound of something loud.

Going to his room, he finds her trying to mute some piece of technology he doesn’t recognise.

She finally does. “I’m truly sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

He’s half-tempted to try calling T’Challa, not because of the noise but, because, there are moments she seems sadder and quieter than he’s used to, and he’s just now realising: He’s taking a teenager’s word on what happened and why she’s here. For all he knows, T’Challa quietly has people desperately searching high-and-low for Wakanda’s seventeen-year-old runaway princess.

“I know now I can’t fix everything, but I don’t have to like this fact.”

Her words startle him. “Sorry?”

“People die due to not having coloured cloths. There’s enough food, but people die of starvation. The thing you call mental illnesses, we can often help those afflicted in Wankanda, but here, there’s often cruelty, stigmatisation, and ineffective, primitive methods.” She makes a frustrated motion with her hands. “I couldn’t stop my father being dead, but that was supposed to be the only thing. I could fix anything, and that was not a prideful boast.”

Sighing, he sits on the bed. “Yeah, I know. Look, sweetheart, I wish the world was very different than the way it is. I think a lot of people do.”

Suddenly, he feels himself smiling, and she gives him a curious look. “What?”

“You’re just like your brother,” he says.

Shoving him off the bed, she says something he suspects isn’t particularly flattering in Xhosa.

He knows, before her father died, before Killmonger happened, she was happy and self-assured, and her country owed so much to her before she was even a teenager. Part of him wishes she could always be young, carefree, and sheltered. As glad as he is Wakanda isn’t so isolationist anymore, as grateful as he is for all the help others around the world are receiving due to this decision, there is a cost to people like her and her brother. They have the instinct and desire to help, but until their world truly expanded beyond their country, they didn’t have an accurate idea how much help this world truly needs.

Another part of him already feels sorrow for the day when his own baby cousin is a teenager, and then, a grown adult on this planet so many humans have made to be such a difficult, dangerous place.

Getting back up, he considers squeezing her hand but decides against it. “Listen, Shuri- What do you need me to say here? What will help you?”

She sets the technology on the floor. “I will never give up. I am the daughter of Ramonda and T’Chaka, sister to King T’Challa. We do not stop simply because we encounter pain or hardship. Not if we know that we’re on the right path. But- why do you do what you do, Agent Ross? I know what propels them, but it can’t be the same with me.”

“For me, part of it is, I love my country, and I believe in all it could be. America has its share of problems, some bigger than others. But it’s supposed to be a place of freedom, kindness, and opportunity. It’s supposed to stand for all those things. I try my best to keep it and its citizens safe so that, hopefully, one day, they can make it all it’s truly supposed to be.”

“The other part-” He hesitates.

“Yes,” she prods with encouraging eyes.

“Most of my family is good, but some of them weren’t.”

“And you’re attempting to atone for their actions?”

“No. What they did was their decision. I’m sorry for their actions, but I don’t hold any responsibility towards what they did. It’s more along the lines of, I learned when I was very young that there could be bad things and bad people anywhere. I couldn’t do much about some of my family, but I could do things to stop people who were worse than them.”

“What did they do? Or is that too personal?”

“My grandfather was a Grand Dragon.”

He doesn’t make a habit of announcing this, but there have been times when it’s come up. When it's come up to a black person, they've always had a certain expression, and for a moment, he’s confused by her lack of it and downright concerned by the expression she does have before he remembers: She’s a foreigner who’s been raised in a land literally filled with mysticism, interacts with rhinos the way most people interact with horses, and might simply have little-to-no knowledge of the Ku Klux Klan.

“A dragon? Do you mean an actual dragon, or is there an animal nicknamed that? Lizards?”

“Have you ever heard of the KKK? The Ku Klux Klan?”

She shakes her head.

“They aren’t listed as a terrorist organisation, but they’re a terrorist organisation. And my grandfather and a few other people in my family were part of it. I think one of my aunts might still be, but I don’t know. None of us have seen or heard from her in years.” He takes a breath. “If you look it up, be careful. There’s a chance you’ll see pictures of people hanging.”

“Hanging as in death by-”

“Yes. One of the ways the KKK used to deal with certain people was to lynch them. They'd find a tree, tie a rope around the person’s neck, and tie the other end of the rope around a high tree branch.”

Her face scrunches up. “These people they did that to, they were black, weren’t they?”

He sighs. “Yep. They didn't go solely after black people, but those were their main targets and the ones most likely to be killed when targeted.”

“Real dragons could be irritably territorial, but they were largely peaceful creatures.”

Part of him is sure she’s joking, but after all the other stuff he’s experienced and learned about over the past few years-

He studies her face, and she looks at him with an almost too-innocent expression.

Then, she bursts out laughing.

Relaxing, he rolls his eyes. “I’d say I’m glad to see your delightful sense of humour is back, but.”

“As far as I know, dragons have never truly existed. However, all the mythology I’ve read about them- do you Americans have different legends and the like?”

“I don’t know. What I do know is: The Klan is often a disorganised mess who, half of them, probably couldn’t tell you how or why a large number of their rituals came to be. In the past, they got away with so much, because, people agreed with what they were doing. Enough did at any rate. Now, public opinion is largely against them.”

Sometimes, he wonders if it truly is, but he’d like to believe all the people his job requires him to interact with, the sadists, the hatefully deluded, the ones who, to quote Game of Thrones, would burn down the world if it meant they could rule over the ashes truly are outnumbered. He’d like to believe most people don’t have hate in their hearts or an inability to truly view certain different but harmless people as fellow human beings.

“Have you ever been scared you’d be like these Klan family members?”

“No. When I was little and didn’t have the words, I still knew that what they were saying was wrong. I didn’t need my parents to tell me. They did, but even if they hadn’t, the only thing that would have been different would be it taking longer for me to figure out the correct words.”

“How do you handle the fact you can’t always succeed? I know why I create things and strive to help people. Sometimes, kings can’t do what they want or what they feel is right, but my father helped my brother learn to handle this. But- I could fix anything."

“One of my instructors once said, ‘Failure happens. It should be avoided as much as possible, but when it happens, how it’s handled is more important than the fact it happened. If an agent can’t handle failure, they have no business being an agent.’ And I’ve found this to be true.”

Her response is a raised eyebrow and an unimpressed half-glare.

It’s probably a good thing he’ll hardly ever see his baby cousin. He can deal with criminals, idiots, and normal people. His social skills utterly fail him, however, when children are involved.

Shuri is a teenager, but she’s not a child. Finding out she was sixteen didn't significantly alter his interactions with her, but he didn’t even particularly register her as a teenager when they first met. Yet, despite his lack of experience interacting with anyone under the age of twenty, excluding cases where he’s helping stop a would-be genocidal dictator, here he is, discussing family, failure, and personal belief systems with a seventeen-year-old girl.

“Aside from this, I’ve always loved Star Wars,” he admits. “Do you-”

“My parents loved watching Star Wars with us,” she excitedly informs him. “Or with me and Nakia, at least. T’Challa’s never had much interest in it. Most of the technology is primitive or simply unimaginative, but a few of my inventions came from ideas the movies inspired.”

He laughs. “Yes, well- when I was a kid, my parents weren’t religious. They taught me right from wrong but could never answer my questions about why there were bad people and why bad things happened to good people. Then, one day, I found myself thinking about balance. If there are good guys who never make mistakes or suffer setbacks, what if there are bad guys who are the same? I’d rather have things go badly for me than risk there being a bad guy out there who has the same amazing luck.”

“Everyone has some bad in them,” he continues. “I know that for a fact. I’d like to believe everyone has, at least, a tiny bit of good in them.”

Leaning against the headboard, she says, “Thank you for talking to me, Ross. My family and friends would make time, but they’re all so busy. And most of them, I already know what they’d say. Thank you for giving me a new way to consider things.”

“No problem.” He’s tempted to ask if she knows he’s on vacation, and if so, how, but the truth is, if he weren’t, he’d have simply given her his spare key before leaving.

“Wakanda has produced a documentary about our history and cultures. I’ve volunteered to make sure the English, Chinese, and Arabic subtitles are accurate before we start releasing it to the world. Would you like to watch some?”

“That sounds great.”

She beams, and he feels warmth flood him.

He starts to grab his remote, and she scoffs. “Your TV is boring. It wouldn’t be in any danger of blowing up from my Wi-Fi enhancements if my Wi-Fi enhancements were somehow capable of causing explosions in TVs.” She fiddles with a bracelet, and suddenly, in front of the bed is an unnervingly solid three-dimensional holographic scene of text.

“That’s mostly legal stuff. I’ll do it later.” She does something to the bracelet, and suddenly- he knows T’Challa and Okoye aren’t standing in his room, and nor is the throne room they’re standing in, but- if this technology ever becomes available to America, he’ll stick to his boring TV.

Making himself comfortable on the bed, he listens to them and reads the nearby subtitles.

“I wish regular TV did subtitles like this."

Laughing, she leans back, too. “I got the idea from a deaf friend who told me that...”

...

He wakes up, and  _I’m an idiot_ , goes through his head.

Most of the documentary he saw was interesting, but then, there was a segment on rhinos. For anyone interested in veterinary science, especially of large animals, he’d highly recommend it. Otherwise, though, even the few shots of rhinos that would appeal to people who find them cute, he doubts they’d be enough to hold most non-veterinary inclined people’s interest.

And now, he’s in bed next to a sleeping teenage girl. Worse, though he’s wearing a shirt and pyjama bottoms, she’s wearing only a shirt with underwear, and he really should have taken more notice of this before he ever sat down on the bed.

The lights are off, there’s no holograms playing, and the sheet is over both of them with the majority of it wrapped around her.

He wishes she’d pushed him off the bed again.

Repressing a sigh, he gets out of bed, adjusts the sheet over her, and goes back to the couch. If there are going to be consequences for this, he’ll face them when they come.

…

Knocking wakes him, and looking at his watch, he sees it’s 8 in the morning.

Looking through the peephole confirms T’Challa has arrived early.

“Your highness,” he greets.

Smiling, T’Challa nods. “Ross.” His eyes flick between Ross and the couch. “You didn’t need to give up your bed for my sister.”

Before he can respond, Shuri comes out speaking Xhosa. After they hug, they continue speaking Xhosa, and based on their tones and body language, they’re having a disagreement.

After going to the bathroom and starting some coffee, he clears his throat. “I’m going to make some breakfast. Would either of you like anything?”

“No, thank you,” T’Challa answers. “And thank you, Agent Ross, for taking care of Shuri. I’m sorry for her simply-”

She smacks her brother. “He’s on vacation, and aside from the rhino segment, he found our documentary interesting. Oh, I left a DVD on your nightstand.”

He’s curious if she had a DVD or if she somehow made one between her arrival and now but decides it isn’t important. “Thank you. I’ll skip over that section and finish it.”

“Good. I’ll go change and get my stuff.”


End file.
